Can You Fairly Distinguish Commercial vs. Non-Commercial Use In Copyright?

from the not-convinced...-but... dept

One issue that comes up in discussions of copyright quite often is the idea of whether or not you could change copyright law to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial use. In some ways this is quite appealing, and Cory Doctorow's latest column makes the case for at least exploring those distinctions. However, even he admits that there is a gray area, and I wonder if that gray area is really complex. I don't think it would necessarily make copyright law any worse, and my guess is that, at least initially, it would make copyright function better. After all, copyright law itself was really intended for commercial use (though, there are some lobbyists who falsely claim otherwise). It's only in this day and age when everyone has the tools of content creation, reproduction, performance and distribution in their pockets and on every desk that the old copyright laws have been shown to not function properly at all.

So perhaps separating out commercial and non-commercial use is a step in the right direction. But I'm still confused about how you determine what really is commercial use vs. non-commercial use. If I use your information to make an investment, is that commercial use? If I have a blog that uses a bit of your content, but has ads on it, is that commercial use? There are some RSS feeds that declare "not for commercial use!" But, if I put that RSS into my feed reader and read it for work, is that commercial use? It's not really that clear. And given that many individuals and companies feel that any even (borderline) commercial use of their works deserves compensation, you could see an awful lot of lawsuits filed as we try to define the borders. Perhaps copyright law could be written to make the border clear (though, I doubt it). Perhaps the lawsuits would establish clear boundaries as well, after a bit of upheaval and lawsuits. But I think that there will always be new situations that again test the fuzzy border between the two types of use, and drawing any sort of bright line distinction won't really fix very much.

Filed Under: commercial, copyright, copyright reform, non-commercial

Is Vimeo Arbitrarily Taking Down Videos It Deems As 'Commercial'?

from the that-makes-no-sense dept

With Vimeo recently getting sued by EMI for supposedly encouraging infringement of their music in videos, it's interesting to note that Vimeo is apparently arbitrarily and ridiculously aggressive in cutting off anyone who uses the service for any sort of "commercial" purpose (found via Shocklee). The story is quite bizarre, but apparently Vimeo has buried in its terms of service that you can't use the service for commercial reasons -- though almost no one knows this. Yet, Vimeo itself seems to decide rather arbitrarily if your videos are commercial or not and then gives you a 24-hour notice to remove your videos. This is rather disappointing. Vimeo's player is actually quite nice (much nicer than YouTube's), and I've recommended many others to use its service. I had my own odd problem with Vimeo last year when for some unknown reason the company completely deleted my account and locked me out of using the service. Eventually they restored the account, but no explanation for the deletion was ever given (and it made me look bad, because I had been discussing stuff with someone, who then accused me of deleting my posts).

The other oddity is the claim that Vimeo says you cannot embed Vimeo videos on sites that show ads, as that's "commercial use." Once again, we get into the difficulty of figuring out what is commercial use? If I embed a Vimeo video in a blog post is that commercial use? This is a blog, but it's part of our business. Similarly, some of the speeches I've given in the past couple of years were put online using Vimeo. Are these "commercial use"? Are they then commercial use if I happen to embed the video in the blog? What if I embed someone else's video in this "commercial" blog? Like -- as we did with the Vimeo getting sued story -- embedded a video from Vimeo itself? It's nearly impossible to figure out what is and what's not commercial. About the only thing you can say is that you probably shouldn't use Vimeo for anything, because its policies appear to be totally arbitrary and prone to suddenly losing the videos you thought you had legitimately posted.

Filed Under: commercial, non-commercial, videos
Companies: vimeo